Planet Fever (29 page)

“
Don’t worry about the details. Do you trust me?
” Atoz Al Ways’ voice asked.

I laughed loudly like the hyenas: a mad, astonished, knowing foolish laughter. I laughed so hard I doubled over and rolled around on the ground. I stopped laughing when the edge of some hard box dug into my shoulder blade.

A book.

A Book of Life.

My Book of Life….

The distant roar of a motor hit my ears: someone was heading my way. I jumped up, grabbed the dirt-encrusted book with the visible words “My Book of Life” on the cover, and tossed it into my backpack. I found my dusty clothes in there so I put them on and waited, listening to the engine’s approach.

A golden gleam of metal came forth in a wake of dust, ripping down the dirt road. The vehicle pulled into my camping area fast and skidded to a halt. As the dust settled, a golden Z-28 Camaro with dark-tinted windows appeared. The driver revved the monster engine up a few times before turning the car off. The door opened and the heel of a cowboy boot crunched into the gravel. Another cowboy boot emerged and hit the dirt. Standing in those boots was a grinning, head-shaking Ezekiel Buckminster.

“Man, you’re one wily cat to track down.” He dabbled some snuff between his thumb and forefinger and snorted.

The parched lips on my red-hot face cracked as I smiled. Some crust fell from my bottom lip.

EZ approached me, still shaking his head and now whistling in astonishment. “What the Sam Hill are you doing out here in the desert? You on some kind of vision quest or something? Shit.”

He patted me off and handed me a canteen. The water washed down my throat like a flash flood through a parched river basin. He grabbed my backpack, slung it around his shoulder, took my arm and walked me to the Camaro. He opened the passenger door, tossed the backpack inside, and I got in. The plush interior of the sports-car bucket seat felt like a nice soft hug from a favorite aunt. EZ got in, fired up the engine, and through well-engineered German speakers, Johnny Cash’s “Ghost Rider’s In The Sky” blared. EZ peeled out, spun a 180 degree turn (still peeling out) and gassed it to about 75 mph on the narrow dirt road … calm and nonchalant as an old pro.

EZ JAMMED
the car up onto the Interstate and we motored due east—the late afternoon sun began its slow descent in the rearview.

“Wow. I feel clean.”

EZ chuckled.

“My mind feels clean. Clear.”

“You’re probably delirious, my friend. Heat stroke and lack of food and water’ll do that to a man.”

“I’m detoxed. Got all those poisons out of my system. No pills, no booze, no shitty food, no shitty water.”

“Sounds like you are officially
rebooted,
my friend.”

The motor droned and the Mars-like landscape of Utah blurred by. I checked my watch—the same one EZ handed me back at Whynot, Fillono’s Rocky Mountain utopia retreat.

A thought clicked into my mind:
this watch is how EZ tracked me down….

“This thing certainly has some range.”

EZ pshawed. “Naw, man. I had to make some modifications to the homer. I rigged a portable one with amplified range and hooked it to the battery of this car, but right now it only has about a 100-mile radius, though I got something in the pipeline with far greater range, just need a secondary tracker.”

He slowed the car down and we passed by a Utah State Patrol speed-gunning the passing cars on the freeway.

“I checked your channel after you vamoosed, to see what the hell happened to you that night. Some commando dude in military get-up pulled a snatch-n-grab on you. Plugged you with a syringe while you were chilling out then put some harness on you, right there on the deck. Then up. Out of our camera range.”

“Last thing I remember was talking to Fillono on the deck, then finding myself in an Air Force Colonel’s office…. He made it seem like everything prior was an elaborate hallucination—as though me being at Fillono’s was a complete fabrication of my mind conjured up by some experimental drug I had been taking.”

EZ kept the vehicle at a steady eighty. “They got you guinea-pigged good.”

I remembered the Colonel saying my mind, via the direction and machinations of the drug, was manufacturing scenarios and invisible enemies and rendering them as quite real. Was EZ one of them?

“They must’ve had a chopper hovering above, just waiting to carry me off.” I was baiting EZ.

“No dice. Everybody in the place and their grandmas would’ve heard a chopper. You know how quiet that place is. A chopper would’ve made an apocalyptic racket. Naw man, they nabbed you in a vehicle dark, quiet and tip-top secret. I’m betting one of those triangle jobs you see on those UFO shows. Whatever it was, it was shadowy and silent, because none of the cams picked it up. Just a cloudy shape was the best I could make out. I reckoned any cat that gets snatched by commandos and spirited away in some clandestine aircraft has got to have something going on worth smokin’ out. So I reckoned I’d be the one doing the smoking. After checking the footage, I checked your last known tracker ping and it was headed south by southwest. That’s when I thought they were scooting you back to around Vegas—Area 51 Air Force Base. I know they got secretive shit going on there. You sayyou recall chatting with Fillono, then being in an office of some military brass?”

“Yup. He repelled in after Fillono left—we’d been having espressos out on the deck—I was just watching the sun go down. Next thing I knew, there he was, on the deck, babbling about the pronunciation of the word ‘inalienable’, then I was in his office—on some base, and you were right—outside Las Vegas. It was West. Colonel West.”

The radar detector on the Camaro’s dash beeped and he again slowed the vehicle down, signaled and got behind a tractor-trailer rig. An SUV with Massachusetts tags whizzed by to our left.

“Colonel West? Shit.” EZ was deep in thought.

“Yeah.”

“You are certain of this piece of data?”

“Yeah. I am pretty sure I met him once before.”

EZ checked the rearview and chuckled. A Utah State Trooper—lights and sirens—blew by us.

“That’s bad news. I think I’m starting to get the narrative here.”

“Yeah. Me too. West is definitely working with a handler mind-technician quack who goes by the name of Dr. Götzefalsch—I think that’s who introduced me to West. And he is either using or working with Fillono. I think West is trying to implement a mind-control system planet-wide. He knows I know the score, so he is trying to neutralize me, and trace me back to Moroni, who may or may not have been working with him, and if he was, he went AWOL.”

“Shit,” EZ said.

We passed by the SUV, which had gotten pulled over. The driver was pleading with the trooper, who was writing a ticket.

“I think you’re on point. But I got a hunch you are being, or have been, sheep-dipped for something else, too.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means you’ve been given an alternate identity for some kind of furtive shit. They dip the sheep to get rid of all the crap on it. Figuratively, it’s getting rid of details of your life so you are not known to be an operative. Usually nasty business. Lee Oswald was sheep-dipped and he knew it. Why do you think he claimed he was a patsy? Now I suspect they can do it so the person being dipped can’t remember it happening. Makes it real hard to blow your cover if you don’t even think there is a cover to be blown.”

EZ’s spiel seemed plausible.

I wondered about Fillono. I am certain EZ mulled over him as well as he punched the gas and we cruised eastward into the approaching night.

AT 11:05
p.m. MST, EZ pulled the car into the gravel parking lot of the Vagabond Inn in the town of Grand Junction, Colorado—a small city just east of the Utah border.

The two-bed room was rustic and the dark-brown fuzz carpeting threadbare; a painting of an 1800s wagon train in a mesa-ridden landscape—the centerpiece of the wall behind the TV—“tied” the room together. A small table by the heavy-curtained window, a desk with lamp between the beds, and a small shower, toilet and sink in the back rounded out the orangish-brown-hued el cheapo motel room.

“You hit the shower, I’m gonna head to the convenience store next door and nab some goods,” EZ said.

The water hit my crunchy, dusty skin and ran down my body like a mudslide. Amazing how much dirt had gotten onto me—the water hitting the drain was brown throughout most of the shower. I soaped off twice for good measure. I finalized my half-hour hose-down by letting the water hit the back of my neck for a few minutes. I exited from that shower a new and refreshed man.

EZ had laid some new clothes on the sink: a pair of sweatpants, socks, and a 1996 Colorado Avalanche Stanley Cup Champions T-shirt—all purchases he had made at the truck-stop/convenience store next door. It all fit, maybe a tad loose on the sweats. He had also bought a bunch of Beef Jerky, some protein bars, a carton of milk, some orange juice, a box of Grape-Nuts and a bag of Cheetos.

I opened up the bag of jerky, sat on one of the beds and flipped on the tube to some program about Evel Knievel. I held the channel there, but with the volume low.

EZ was at the table eating a protein bar and Cheetos and writing in a small, leather-bound notebook. He would scribble, pause, scratch his chin, take a bite from the bar, scribble, pause, do a calculation in his head, eat a Cheeto, then scribble some more. He went on like this for a good five minutes.

Evel jumped over twenty buses.

EZ stopped writing and looked over at me. “You mind me asking you a question?”

“Go for it.”

“You said you met Col. West one time before. When?”

“I don’t know. I had a tripped-out mescaline vision of meeting him right before I met you, but I think the actual meeting was well before that. I can’t be sure.”

“They probably had you pilled-out when you originally met. You recall anything he said to you?”

“He called me a
hero
.”

“And lemme make certain I got this straight: this recent time he gave you the song and dance of you’re-a-guinea-pig-for-an-experimental-psychotropic-drug-and-everything-is-a-figment-of-your-imagination.”

Knievel cleared some more busses. “Yup. That about covers it.”